AT MY BEST...

It's hard to believe that in a matter of weeks I will have the privilege to take this gorgeous girls year 12 formal photos. It feels like only yesterday I took these ones.

One of my greatest loves about formal photos, especially year 10, is that the hair and make up are done and the dream dress is bought and worn. They feel so comfortable being themselves and feeling beautiful. They are happy with their friends. And I am the lucky one that gets to take the photos, when they look back and realise that they really are as beautiful as they felt.

These photos were all taken in Port Kembla, NSW and Market Square, Wollongong. We weren't expecting a wet day, but it played into our hands.

We had a lot of fun, and know that this next round of photos will be the same. I cant wait to see the dress, the hair and the make up, but most of all, I cant wait to see you feel as beautiful as we all already know you are.

When a special event comes around, I love nothing more than using my scrapbooking skill to make something to help record the memory for them. One of the best ways to do this is with a mini album. My lovely sister in law has just turned 40, where we had a high tea with her family and friends. While out enjoying the afternoon, I passed around a few project life cards and got everyone helping to celebrate leave a note for the birthday girl.

I took these home and, with a few photos from the day, pulled together this album.

I will admit that the shape of the album was extremely difficult to work with and I struggled to wrap my head around it, but I got it together in the end.

The album itself is chipboard, and was bought from spotlight. I covered the pages with a combination of patterned papers. As the notes were personal, I haven't included photos of each of the pages, but you can see the photos placed on each page were instax. This gives a bit more character to the album.

The chipboard piece on the front is chipboard, has been sprayed with a Heidi Swapp mist and microbeads stuck to it as an accent. I actually really love how it came out.

After watching a Patreon video for Adele from Inkie Quill, I decided to have a go at making my own embellishments. They worked a treat for this album as helped tie all the pages together with another common element.

I had a few chipboard wine bottles hanging around, and this project was perfect to use them up. To tie all the chipboard together, I used microbeads on the bottle necks.

To finish off the album, I doodled a boarder on each page, and tied off the silver binding rings with a whole heap of ribbon and lace cuts from similar colours to the inside of the album.

I have been involved in photography for a long time now, especially back in the film days (I feel like an old person with the 'back in my day' line). Small fact: My first qualification was as a film processer and photo printer in a mini lab. A job I loved and still miss some days. Once things went to the digital world, I felt it became more about who could edit a photo more, rather than the natural eye for design.

Looking back now, photographing weddings on film should have been a highly stressful job, with so much that could go wrong..... At the time it wasn't. I found it was a great creative outlet, that I was good at. Besides weddings, I always seemed to find myself wrapped up in family and friends school formal photos. I have always had fun with these, and love that we can play around with not as tight time schedule, and that they are less formal than a wedding.

Photographing formals is something that I still continue to enjoy to this day. I usually talk about ideas with the people I am working with, and love to scope out the photography area well before the day, just to get a feel for the area, and have ideas in mind to use the space well.

For this formal back in 2014 I didn't have the chance to view the spaces first. I walked in sight unseen, trusting others judgement, and them trusting my skill. I actually loved both of the places that were chosen, and it didn't give me the chance to over think, I just had to get in and shoot. This is one of my favourite shoots ever!

I love this brick tunnel location. And with a nice breeze blowing we got some beautiful body in the dress skirt.

These locations were amazing, and ones that I will use again for other shoots.

What a fun afternoon it was, and the results from the photos are some of my best.

Of all the cards I make, it is the vintage style that I love the most. They seem to just come together so well and so easily. This one was no different. This card would have taken me no more than 30 minutes from start to finish.

The card it self is a kraft cardstock base and has been cut from a standard 12x12 inch sheet. The only downfall is that I don't have envelopes on hand for this size.

Some brown ink, chipboard with Gold colour shine, a little bit of lace and a few flowers are all this one needs. So simple yet so effective!

I really should make a few spare for those occasions that pop up when you need a card at last minute!

It has been just over 12 months since we spent a wonderful month in the Hawaiian Islands, so it seems fitting that I finally pull my finger out and get the drone footage edited and uploaded to my YouTube channel. I need to say a thank you to one of my beautiful mothers group mums, Sarah, for inspiring me to get on with it and get these uploaded.

We stopped for lunch on our way to the North Shore of Oahu, at Kualoa Beach Park overlooking one of my favourite places on the island, Chinaman's Hat (Mokoli'i Island). While there we put the drone up to see what it looked like from the other side. The nickname Chinaman's Hat comes from the island resembling an Asian conical straw hat.

We all have boards on Pinterest full of wonderful ideas that, I'm sure we have great intentions to actually do something with. These days I am very selective as to what I pin on my boards, unless it is purely for inspiration (I have a couple for this that are separate from the others). I don't want to clutter them with "things". I want to use them for items I really want to achieve, ideas that will actually come to fruition.

I know that we all see posts that make things look super easy, and this little project was one of those! I bought the Ikea 3 pack of cork hot mats and a couple of fat quarters of material. The theme was black and white so I wanted to have 3 different prints, so regardless of how they are hung on the wall, there wont be a matching print.

I set to cutting the material, which I didn't really measure out in any way. I knew I needed a good amount to be able to wrap all the way around the back. I initially started gluing these together with a hot glue gun, but very quickly swapped over to my trusty fabric glue as the hot glue was leaving a raised surface under the material and wasn't sticking well to the cork.

I folded the material over and, I will be honest, it was a total mess! To combat this issue, I found a bowl or plate just a bit smaller than the back of the cork. I proceeded to trace this onto paper and use it as a pattern to cut a circle out of the corresponding materials. I have then just glued this over the back to cover the mess that was!

This could have ended up as a pinterest fail, but with a bit of thinking outside the square, I was able to save them :-)

After spending much of the tail end of November 2016 trying hard to get my Documenting December album from 2015 completed, I pushed it aside, still not finished, to get into 2016's album. I'm not sure this was a great idea, but the 2016 album is very reflective of ideas gathered from YouTube videos that I watched during December 2016, and incorporates different elements to the, what was feeling very boring and mundane 2015 album. I actually love how the 2016 album came together in the end.

The album is a 6x8 album. I'm still not sold on this size, but it has made me think outside the square to be able to incorporate different elements for more room, and all of the Barry the Elf photos are just at the back together. I must admit I do miss not having the daily Barry mischief on the actual day like I did in 2014's 6x12 album (here & here). 2016, has however, made me look at focusing the day on one activity/story rather than trying to record everything like I did in 2015. This may also be why the 2015 album is still not finished! Its just too much. I am also aware that these new ideas will need to be used in 2017 to incorporate everything from Miss H's first Christmas.

The base kit used was from Felicity Jane (here) with a lot of other items added in along the way, including a card set from Fancy Pants and Heidi Swapp minc numbers (some have been left how they came from the packet and others have been embossed as I didn't own a minc machine at this point in time).

So without any further ramble, here is the finished product (I will eventually get into doing these as a flip through on YouTube, but while the confidence isn't there, pictures will have to do)! Where I can, I will add where some of these ideas came from.

I tried to incorporate both typed journaling and hand written journaling, depending on the size space I had available. I love the combination of both.

I left the kraft tag floating in the pocket, which I love and will do again this year.

I used the black & white stripe bag as an envelope to hold the guide, post cards and tickets from our day out in Sydney at an exhibition. It worked so well.

Using screen shots from social media is a great addition to the album and adds extra voices to the album.

This is the first time that I have included something like the thankful list and I love how it adds to the record keeping of the album.

The use of 6x3 sleeves came from either Ali Edwards or Amy Gretchen and I have created them with the fuse tool from a 6x8 sleeve. To fill them, I had 6x8 photos printed and cut them down. At the time of taking the photos I didn't have this idea in mind, so was lucky that I took a few photos on each of these days, which gave me at least one that would work.

The 18th was a big day with a lot of laughs and a long story that I really wanted to tell.... In short, my hubby cant build a gingerbread house! To be able to do this I used the pocket page sleeve to hold a few photos that speak for themselves. To tell the story, I added another little bag and cut down my own tags to suit. This gave me the space to add a couple more photos that fell in line with the story (and those tags are journal on both sides!). One tag has been cut shorter than the other so that you can see them both when flipping through the album (as per below).

This kit from Felicity Jane included transparency sheets, which I was excited about. I was able to incorporate them throughout and I love how they work. It did take a bit of extra thinking about using them, as I needed to make sure that the elements on front and back didn't look out of place. This one has been turned into a tag to back the number on one side and journal space on the other.

Christmas day included a whole lot of separate inserts to include everything, as it is one very busy day for us. I tried not to replicate the same layout twice on for the day to keep interest.

Little things like gift tags or product tags can be incorporated as a design element or extra journal space.

Our Christmas continues for a couple of days, so the 26th was also a big day. It was spent more relaxing this year, than taking lots of photos, so there are too many included, but I love the tradition of a photo of the cousins all together every year, and this year I am so glad I printed it as a 6x8 to make it a statement for that day.

The transparency was used to highlight the date, but I really wanted to keep this gift tag, so it worked well for us to be able to read it, without it being loose in the album.

Part of my process it to document the whole month, not just up to December 25th, as we are usually on holidays at this time of year. I was very pregnant this year, so I really wanted to incorporate that where I could too.

I recorded a reflection on 2016 as an extra page in my album (something I did in 2015 as a picture collage only) as it was a very big year, 2 overseas holidays and finding out Miss H was on the way. It was a very happy year, and I love being able to pull together an Instagram collage with some of our highlights to remember it by.

That point in the album concludes the daily December documenting. But there are always a couple of other items I really want to include, so separate them off and give them their own spread at the back of the album.

This year was my 3rd taking part in the Fat Mum Slim gift exchange, and Austies 1st. I always love to document the experience with photos of the gift I received and the one I sent. It there are any cards, letters or postcards, this gives me a place to store them too.

I find screen shots of social media comments and postage stamps (especially international ones) add to the record of the event.

And who can forget Barry's antics. These really need to be documented too. I can always reference Instagram for the notes from each day, but I think a lot of the pictures speak for themselves, so I printed them up as 2x2 photos, dated each day with a small number sticker and randomly placed them into the sleeve.

You can see I have used a mix of sleeves for this album, as there just wasn't enough in the Felicity Jane kit. There are a combination of brands, including Ali Edwards, Kaiser and Stampin Up. This doesn't bother me, as I could achieve the look that I wanted by doing this. I did however have to punch new holes in some pages so that they would fit in the album.

I think having elements such as the paper bags, extra 6x4 photos, cards and 6x8 photos punched and placed straight into the album without sleeves, allows this combination of different sleeves to go unnoticed.

I can't wait to get started on this years album, but I really need to finish 2015 next before I get too far ahead of myself!! It doesn't hurt to start planning though, and now is the time before we hit that made rush at the end of the year.... Anything to set yourself up to succeed in finishing the album.

About me

Living in paradise still has its ups and downs!! I live with my wonderful husband Austin and our furbaby border collie Echo on the sunny south coast of NSW, Australia. I work full time for a transport company, am involved with Aussie Rules, love to travel and try and find time for the creative part of my life with photography and scrapbooking. I always have more than one project on the go. It's just a question as to when I will get back to it! Join me on my journey through all things life, love and craft.